Please direct any enquiries to the organisers Ceri Hovland and Lucy FifeDonaldson at actingout_at_reading.ac.uk___________________________________________________________________________"Clearly films depend on a form of communication whereby meanings are actedout." (Naremore, Acting in the Cinema, p. 2) "I would like to say that whatI am doing in reading a film is performing it (if you wish, performing itinside myself)." (Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, 1981, pp. 37-38.)

This one-day symposium seeks to provide a forum for scholars of screenacting to meet and progress the spate of recent work on performance onfilm. We would like to explore how we draw out performance through aninterrogation of the relationship between performance, inference andinterpretation.

As viewers we frequently respond instinctively to thematerial and kinetic details of the performer within their fictional world.In consequence, the role of inference could be said to be indivisible frominterpretation. But how important is that moment between engaging with aperformance and analysing it? How do you find it and observe it? What isthe role of inference in the process and production of performance? What isleft unsaid and/or assumed in performance?

Arguably, many performancescommunicate in non-verbal ways and leave a certain amount to theimagination but how does this vary between performance styles? Morehistrionic, melodramatic or ostensive performances are frequently thoughtof as offering more privileged access to thoughts and feelings or even atransparently clear communication of meaning. What kinds of assumptionsunderpin this way of thinking about performance? And where does this leavemore contained or repressive performances? T

he perceived problem ofsubjectivity is the ghost of film studies, haunting many analyses butrarely addressed directly. How do discourses around spectatorship effectdiscussion of performance? Could it be that the study of performance isuniquely disposed to alerting us to the complexity of engagement?